Richard Gotthttp://www.newstatesman.com/writers/richard_gott
enhttp://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/world-affairs/2013/01/hugo-chavez-man-against-world
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>As illness ends Hugo Chávez’s rule in Venezuela, what will his legacy be? Richard Gott argues he brought hope to a continent.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><a href="/world-affairs/world-affairs/2013/01/hugo-chavez-man-against-world"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/201304chavez1.jpg?itok=Lvpek2jm" width="510" height="348" title="1" /></a></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Hugo Chávez sitting in the shadow of Bolívar, pausing during a press conference. Portrait: Andrew Cutraro</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p><em>This piece was originally published as part of a cover package in the New Statesman magazine, alongside <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/01/hugo-chavez-elected-autocrat" target="_blank">an article by Rory Carroll entitled "An elected autocrat"</a>.</em></p>
<p>An atmosphere of sadness and imminent tragedy has taken over the towns and cities of Venezuela as Hugo Chávez nears death. For so long portrayed in the west as a buffoon or a socialist firebrand, this immensely important political figure has suddenly begun to be treated with dignity and respect.</p>
<p>What is not yet understood is that Chávez, who is suffering from cancer, has been the most significant ruler in Latin America since Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba in January 1959, more than half a century ago. Such extraordinary and charismatic people emerge rarely in history; they leave an imprint that lasts for decades.</p>
<p>I have long been a supporter of Chávez, writing and talking about him since he first emerged as a serious and revolutionary political contender in the middle of the 1990s. He embodied two vibrant traditions from Latin America in the 1960s: the memory of the left-wing guerrilla movements of that period, inspired by Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution (and, of course, by Castro) and the unusual experience of government by left-wing army officers, notably General Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru and General Omar Torríjos in Panama. He also embraced the powerful current of left-wing nationalism in Latin America’s leftist parties, often repressed during the years of the cold war, but never far from the surface.</p>
<p>Chávez was born in the village of Sabaneta in July 1954, in the wide cattle lands of Barinas State (he is a year younger than Tony Blair). His parents were schoolteachers and members of Copei, the Christian democratic party.</p>
<p>Ambitious to be a baseball player, he joined the army at the age of 17 rather than following his elder brother to study at the University of the Andes in Mérida.</p>
<p>A frustrated intellectual, Chávez became an inspiring history teacher at the Caracas military academy, influencing a generation of young officers with his tales of Venezuelan dissidents from the 19th century, starting with Simón Bolívar. In Venezuela, a country dominated by white European immigrants and overlaid with a thick cultural veneer of American consumerism, he sought to recreate pride in an alternative historical vision of a land peopled by the often-ignored descendants of Native Americans and black slaves.</p>
<p>In 1982, dismayed by the growing decadence and corruption of the civilian politicians, Chávez formed a “Bolivarian revolutionary movement” within the armed forces that started as a political study group and ended up a subversive organisation hoping for an appropriate moment to stage a <em>coup d’état</em>. This came after 1989, when civil unrest erupted in several cities; the armed forces were called out to suppress it with great violence, killing more than a thousand people.</p>
<p>Chávez and his small band of middleranking officers then staged a coup in February 1992. It was successful in much of the country but failed in Caracas, where Chávez was in charge of the insurrection. Faced with defeat, he surrendered and appeared briefly on national television to announce that he was giving up, “for now”.</p>
<p>His implicit promise that he would return another day brought him immediate popularity countrywide, especially in the shanty towns and rural areas.</p>
<p>Chávez represented the hope of profound change in a stagnant and unequal society, and six years later, in 1998, leading an ad hoc party, the “Fifth Republic Movement”, he was elected president of Venezuela with 56 per cent of the vote. His victory was the result of the electoral implosion of the ruling parties of the previous 40 years, Copei and Democratic Action (affiliated to the Socialist International). The remnants of these two discredited parties have struggled unsuccessfully ever since to create an opposition worthy of the name.</p>
<p>At the end of 1999, after Chávez had been in power for a year, I went to Caracas to in - terview him and to write a book about him. It was already obvious then that he was the most interesting figure to have emerged in Latin America since the fall of Salvador Allende’s government in September 1973, nearly 30 years earlier. We met on a Monday morning on the verandah of his home at La Casona, an official residence in eastern Caracas surrounded by a gorgeous tropical garden. I had often seen him loom large on television, but in person he seemed a size smaller. He had an infectious grin and a capacity to talk non-stop and it was difficult to get a word in.</p>
<p>We sat there alone throughout the morning, with occasional calls for coffee and orange juice, as he ranged over the entire history of Latin America. He emphasised the need to halt and reverse the persistent population drain from country to town in Venezuela.</p>
<p>He was impressed that my researches had taken me all over the country, not just to visit his birthplace in Sabaneta but to the remote settlement of Elorza, on a tributary of the Orinoco close to the Colombian border, to which he had been exiled in the 1980s when the government first got wind of his activities. Elorza was a tiring, 12-hour bus journey south of Barinas.</p>
<p>He invited me to fly with him that week to look at various rural projects, and half the cabinet came with us. Chávez asked questions all the time, prodding his ministers to take a direct interest in what needed to be done. His capacity to enthuse and educate was remarkable and left me and the ministers exhausted by the end of the day.</p>
<p>I have been back to Caracas most years since then and have talked to Chávez many times. He has always been the same, welcoming, keen to talk, and always recognising me, even in a crowd. Who was this strange Englishman who had taken the trouble to write a book about him? When among civilians, he would single out old women and small children for attention; at a military parade he would talk to the lowest ranks before taking on the top brass. It is this reversal of normal public practice that has made him so special and so loved.</p>
<p>Chávez had great ambitions to improve conditions for Venezuela’s poor and to include them in the national debate, but in the first few years he had no very clear idea how to do it. His single most significant political initiative, announced on day one, was to call for a progressive constitution, ratified by referendum (a pattern copied by Bolivia and Ecuador). The aim was to change the rules of the political game and lay the groundwork for a more participative society. With the wind of a popular election result in his sails, the enfeebled opposition could do nothing to stop him.</p>
<p>Chávez understood at an early stage that Venezuela needed to revive Opec, the organisation of oil-producing countries, where unity of outlook was needed in order to secure a regular and respectable rent. He visited several Opec states that were unpopular in western eyes, including Iran and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, but it was worth the effort and the opprobrium. With Venezuela leading the first efforts in 1998, the price of oil has risen since then from $10 a barrel to over $100 in 2012. This was a significant change, but Chávez also needed to be persuaded by his own petroleum experts to recover government control of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the nationalised oil company and the country’s chief source of revenue. Under the <em>ancien régime</em>, the company had been organised to benefit itself, not to distribute its royalties for the benefit of the people.</p>
<p>Finally, after a lockout by PDVSA in 2002 (preceded by an equally subversive attempt at a military coup), the Chávez government took full control of the oil company, sacked the old management and forced the foreign companies working under contract to increase the royalties they paid.</p>
<p>Huge sums of money were now diverted into organising wide-ranging social programmes at home and buying influence abroad in the Caribbean, notably in Cuba, as well as in other parts of South America. This has been Chávez’s lasting legacy, and is the basis of his project to promote “21st-century socialism” in Venezuela and more widely on the continent.</p>
<p>Chávez’s rhetoric has been more powerful than his record of achievement. He has recovered the meaning and potential popularity of the word “socialism”, after its worldwide collapse following the self-destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991, and has brought a number of important public utilities under state control. Yet even now France has a larger public sector than Venezuela.</p>
<p>Journalistic NGOs and human rights groups complain about what they see as attacks on freedom of the press in Venezuela, usually mentioning in passing the forced closure of a whites-only television channel that would have been shut down much earlier in other parts of the world. Of the huge widening of the media franchise in Venezuela, in the innumerable new community radio stations and alternative TV channels, there is little comment in foreign reports.</p>
<p>Nor do we hear much from western journalists about the changing nature of life in the shanty towns, with the spread of health programmes and education opportunities, or the recent construction of housing projects, or the experiments with co-operatives and community councils.</p>
<p>Why has Chávez had such a bad press? Several individual journalists are guilty of idleness, ignorance and bad faith. Living cheek by jowl with the opposition population in the upper-class zones of Caracas, they find it difficult not to share the views and prejudices of their neighbours. Yet the poor performance of individuals does not explain why the badmouthing of Chávez has been so prevalent throughout the western world, on the Europe continent and in the United States as well as in Britain. <em>Le Monde and El País, Libération and El Mundo</em> have been just as critical as the reporters of the <em>Guardianand the New York Times.</em></p>
<p>Part of the image problem lies with longsurviving caricatures of Latin America in the popular memory that have little relevance to the continent today. There is a history of military dictators, with or without the dark glasses, which dates back to the first half of the 20th century and reached its peak in the era of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Leopoldo Galtieri in Argentina.</p>
<p>The military tradition led to imprisonment and torture, and the dropping of prisoners out of aeroplanes into the sea. In such a context, how is it that Colonel Chávez, a paratrooper in a red beret, has turned out to be such a progressive man?</p>
<p>Elections in Latin America are more often than not flawed. “You won the election, but I won the count” was the usual response of the Somoza family in Nicaragua to an unfavourable result. Yet outside observers have consistently declared Venezuela’s elections to be fair, and Chávez is no Pinochet. The Venezuelan armed forces have been restructured to serve the people.</p>
<p>Another problem is that Chávez’s reinvention of socialism, as well as his close affection for Fidel Castro, seem old-fashioned to some. Academics who had hoped for a smooth transition to western democratic patterns in Latin America after the downfall of the dictators have also been disappointed by the Venezuelan experience, so different from what they had hoped for or been led to expect. Chávez has fallen foul of most of the left-of-centre politicians and intellectuals in Europe, who have remained in thrall to the social-democratic ideology common in the 1990s. They have ignored his appeal for something different to be summoned up in Latin America.</p>
<p>In a world where such people are subservient to the demands of the American empire, it is easy for the rare figure who speaks out against it to be viewed as an idiot or a despot. Chávez has had good reason to oppose the United States: it has tried to overthrow him. Yet it is not just his rejection of Washington’s foreign wars that alarms: these have had many opponents in Europe, too. It is his outright hostility to US economic policy, filtered through organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, whose formulae are slavishly adhered to in western Europe, that is considered outlandish.</p>
<p>Chávez’s search for a different economic policy, with a powerful role for the state, is thought to be foolish, utopian and destined to fail. Yet with many countries in Europe in a state of economic collapse – largely the result of their long embrace of neoliberal policies – his project for Latin America may soon have wider appeal.</p>
<p>Venezuela and Latin America, and the wider world beyond, now face a future in which Chávez will no longer be physically present. However, he has not only helped to construct and project Venezuela as an interesting and important country for the first time, at ease with itself and its historical heritage, he has reimagined the continent of Latin America with a vision of what might be possible. Long after successive presidents of the United States have disappeared into the obscurity of their presidential archives, the memory of Hugo Chávez will survive in Latin America, along with that of Simón Bolívar and Che Guevara, as an influential leader who promised much but was cut down in his prime.</p>
<p><em>Richard Gott is the author of “Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution” (Verso, £10.99)</em></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 30 Jan 2013 07:48:31 +0000Richard Gott192243 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/non-fiction/2011/10/british-empire-imperial-paxman
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <!-- Generated by XStandard version 2.0.0.0 on 2011-10-27T13:47:18 --><p><strong>Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British</strong> <br />Jeremy Paxman<br /><em>Viking, 368pp, £25</em></p>
<p>Jeremy Paxman's <em>Empire</em> is a disappointment; it fails to do what its subtitle promises: that the author will tell us "what ruling the world did <br />to the British". That would have been an excellent new way of looking at an old subject, but although he makes brief remarks about the downside of the imperial legacy, Paxman writes mostly about the British who went out to run the empire, and not its impact on those who stayed at home. Much of the book consists of a familiar, though often entertaining, rehearsal of tales of imperial derring-do. So we get the "Black Hole" of Calcutta, the subsequent horrors of the city's mutiny and the debate over the source of the Nile, plus the inevitable "Dr Livingstone, I presume", the ill-fated General Gordon, Robert Baden-Powell and the Siege of Mafeking, Kitchener, Rhodes and Lugard - and Lawrence of Arabia.</p>
<p>So far, so good for a television series that will not frighten the horses, all recounted with that faint air of cynical disbelief which is Paxman's trademark <em>Newsnight</em> persona. Indeed, although he notes that the story of empire was treated with considerable levity by the first post-imperial generation of satirists, especially Peter Cook and Richard Ingrams, he cannot help continuing in the same vein himself.</p>
<p>There is rather too much quoting from Macaulay, and from Henry Newbolt, author of mawkish imperial verse ("Play up! play up! and play the game!"), as well as several asides on the value to the empire of sport in general and cricket in particular. He gets rather muddled about slavery and the slave trade, sometimes confusing the two. Britain receives its usual meed of praise for ending the trade, but Paxman ignores the long survival of the practice elsewhere in the empire after it had been forbidden in Britain.</p>
<p>He does wipe the smile off his face, however, when writing about genocide in Tasmania, or the massacre perpetrated by Brigadier General Dyer in Amritsar, or the defeat of the Sudanese at Omdurman, slaughtered in their thousands with the Maxim machine-gun. The tone of the book is recessional (in Kipling's sense of the word) rather than triumphalist.</p>
<p>It is inevitable that many subjects will be left out of a book for the general reader. There is not much about Canada here, nor much about Ireland. But Paxman does find some interesting forgotten stories: Charles Dickens's refusal to believe the report in 1854 that the crew of John Franklin's expedition to find the north-west passage to China had been reduced to cannibalism; the first shots of the First World War outside Europe against a drunken German captain on a boat on Lake Nyasa on the frontier with German East Africa in August 1914. A series of amusing tales culled from the memoirs of colonial servants enlivens the book.</p>
<p>Paxman follows the current wisdom in arguing that the First World War weakened the bonds of empire and the Second finished it off. In spite of the popular imperial enthusiasm on show at the end of the 19th century, it was clear by the 1920s that the British people were no longer very interested in ruling the world. The Labour Party, as today, was uncertain whether it could be both patriotic and anti-imperialist. The imaginative Workers' Exhibition, held in Glasgow in 1938 to rival the official Empire Exhibition, was the work of the Independent Labour Party, not the Labour Party proper. The spadework of anti-imperial argument was done not by Labour stalwarts but by old hands from Burma and Ceylon such as George Orwell and Leonard Woolf (whose Hogarth Press printed the anti-imperial works of Leonard Barnes).</p>
<p>While Paxman's account of empire does not add up to much more than the book of the TV films (which we have not yet seen), he does let slip a few thoughtful comments about Britain's post-imperial predicament. Because the British emerged from two world wars on the winning side, they never had much cause "to reimagine themselves as anything other than what they once had been". Yet other European countries, including Germany and Russia, have come to terms with their questionable imperial history and forged fresh national narratives. Paxman regrets that the British have been unable to think critically about their empire and its legacy. Too many prime ministers wrap themselves in the imperial purple; as he notes, "British foreign policy has never shaken off a certain 19th-century swagger."</p>
<p>Yet perhaps our television presenters bear a measure of responsibility, too. Paxman wonders whether imperial rule would have survived "the scrutiny of the mass media age". He thinks it unlikely. I am not so sure. The post-imperial conflicts of recent years, which are not so different from what went before, are well scrutinised, but to little effect. Paxman argues that the "central ideological pretence of the electronic media is their claim to empower the masses". Maybe that is how he sees himself in the interviewer's chair - the self-appointed spokesman of the masses, benignly but futilely interrogating our rulers on their behalf.</p>
<p><em>Richard Gott's "Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt" is newly published by Verso (£25)</em></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000Richard Gott41512 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/08/vietnam-war-greiner-lai
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The rape, torture and murder of Vietnamese civilians went on before and after the My Lai massacre. T</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><a href="/books/2009/08/vietnam-war-greiner-lai"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles/2009/1050/20090812_3209vietnam-war_w.jpg?itok=94EO_ggJ" width="510" height="348" alt="" /></a></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <!-- Generated by XStandard version 2.0.0.0 on 2009-10-08T11:52:02 --><p>Years ago, as the <em>New Statesman</em>'s correspondent at a UN conference in Chile in the early 1970s, I chanced upon Robert McNamara, the former US defence secretary, in a narrow passage. "War criminal," I hissed as he went by. He looked hurt and confused; he must have suffered the same humiliation many times. Later, I came to regret my youthful gesture, as one of the principal architects of the US disaster in Vietnam sought to remake his life at the World Bank and to atone for the criminal decisions for which he will always be remembered. One reason for my change of heart was the release of White House tapes which showed the role McNamara had played in defusing the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Another was the 2003 documentary film <em>The Fog of War</em>, in which McNamara drew intelligent lessons from the huge errors of Vietnam.</p>
<p>Yet, on reading Bernd Greiner's book, which casts a pitiless light on that most controversial of American wars, I wondered whether my original reaction had not in fact been correct. For among Greiner's conclusions is that McNamara and his colleagues were by no means wandering lost in the fog of war. Far from it; they knew all too well what was going on. They knew about the horror and the excessive violence; they knew civilians were being targeted; and they knew that the policy was doomed to failure. Their crime, and it was a crime, was to allow it to carry on.</p>
<p>“Alternatives were available," Greiner writes, and the decision-makers knew about them. They could have spoken out in favour of a different policy, with the support of "a substantial part of the political elite". One alternative would have been to secure a neutral, reunified Vietnam with communist participation in government. Indeed, that prospect was always on offer. So why did a succession of US presidents (with the diplomatic support, let us not forget, of their British allies) remain bogged down in a quagmire of their own creation? The question is still relevant today, as the protagonists in a similarly hopeless war in Afghanistan seek, and fail, to find a way to abandon a strategy that clearly has no hope of success.<br />Greiner's book is not a definitive history of the Vietnam war, but a well-documented essay on its violent, criminal reality and the failure of American society to come to terms with what happened. His implicit criticism of the role of the United States in Indochina, and his outright condemnation of US war crimes, derive from his distinctive perspective as a German historian. Inevitably, even though Greiner himself never spells this out, an uncomfortable comparison between US and Nazi war crimes grows in the reader's mind.</p>
<p>Only in an astonishing final section, where the author discusses the widespread American opposition to the trial of William Calley, does the shadow of Nuremberg flit across the pages. Lieutenant Calley was the officer held primarily responsible for the 1968 My Lai Massacre, in which 500 men, women and children were killed. The American public, across the political spectrum, objected to the way he was singled out for punishment, and the people rose up in their hundreds of thousands to support him. "Free Calley" was a slogan employed both by those hostile to the war and by those who would have liked it to be prosecuted more vigorously.</p>
<p>Although an account of My Lai makes up a central portion of <em>War Without Fronts</em>, the author argues that it was not exceptional: rape, torture and the murder of civilians had gone on before and continued afterwards. Greiner does not exonerate the murderers, the rapists and the practitioners of torture; but he also identifies the "real" war criminals - those who, from the top down, connived in allowing this to happen. He examines, in turn, the politicians, the generals, the officers and the soldiers themselves. They all knew what was going on, but could not find it in themselves to call a halt.<br />My Lai took place in March 1968, but did not become public knowledge until more than a year later, in November 1969, when the facts were laid out by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh (the accurate details provided immediately after the event by Vietnamese insurgents were dismissed as propaganda). Yet concern about the nature and conduct of the war had been growing, particularly among veterans, for several years, and the then US defence secretary, Melvin Laird, became worried that My Lai would spark further revelations. He set up the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group to secure all information relating to US crimes during the occupation and to rebut the flow of accusations that was expected. In the process, says Greiner, the working group created "the most extensive archive about American war crimes", one barely touched by historians - until now.</p>
<p>Greiner's book concentrates on three episodes in the ground war in South Vietnam - the case of Task Force Oregon, which operated in 1967 <br />in the five provinces immediately south of the border with North Vietnam; My Lai itself; and Operation Speedy Express, launched during the "pacification" of the five provinces south-west of Saigon in 1968-69. The details of these operations serve to bolster Greiner's contention that My Lai was no exception.</p>
<p>Task Force Oregon was given the job, in April 1967, of driving 300,000 people in Quang Ngai Province into "relocation centres". These were, in effect, prisons holding peasants loyal to the Vietcong. The province was then declared a "free fire zone", in which few prisoners were taken, troops were allowed to rape at will, and civilians were indiscriminately fired on. By the end of 1967, 70 per cent of the settlements of the province had been destroyed.</p>
<p>Much of this "calculated terrorism against civilians" was reported at the time by Jonathan Schell in the <em>New Yorker,</em> but even Schell didn't know that the Americans were also operating secret "Tiger Force" death squads, whose activities were fully uncovered only in 2003, thanks to the enterprise of two reporters from the Toledo Blade. Greiner describes how the death squads "shot peasants in the field without any pretext and murdered anyone who happened to cross their path; they tortured prisoners and executed them singly or in groups; they raided villages <br />in the late evening or early morning and mowed down with machine-gun fire everyone they could find - peasants who had gathered for <br />a meal or were sleeping, children playing in the open, old people taking a walk". They raped and murdered their victims and mutilated their bodies. Greiner notes that US customs officers came across dozens of parcels of human bones and skulls, often sent home to friends and relatives.</p>
<p>Operation Speedy Express was a repeat in the South of what had occurred in the North, with the additional use of helicopter gunships. Once again, civilians found themselves in an extensive "free fire zone" and helicopter crews embarked on indiscriminate killing of non-combatants.</p>
<p>My only regret is that Greiner deals solely with the activities of the US army. The equally heinous crimes of the US air force - the carpet-bombing of the North, the aerial destruction of Laos and Cambodia, and the bombardment by B-52s of selected areas of the South - are referred to, but left largely unexamined. During Operation Rolling Thunder, which lasted from 1965 until 1968, the four southern provinces of North Vietnam had more bombs dropped on them than any other area in history. When I travelled through North Vietnam during a halt in the bombing in the early weeks of 1970, I came across villages, towns, bridges, factories and railways that had been destroyed.</p>
<p>Two years later, in May 1972, President Nixon ordered the launching of Operation Linebacker, a six-month campaign that virtually destroyed the remaining industrial centres of the North. It was, writes Greiner, "the most massive attack in the history of aerial warfare". Designed to cover the withdrawal of front-line troops from the South, and to bolster the morale of the abandoned South Vietnamese army based in Saigon, it was perhaps the most cynical of the innumerable criminal acts of a filthy war.</p>
<p>“We're gonna level that goddam country," Nixon was recorded as saying in June 1971. "We're gonna hit 'em, bomb the livin' bejesus out of 'em." To which Henry Kissinger replied: "Mr President, I will enthusiastically support that, and I think it's the right thing to do." This served to prolong the war for several more years, until finally the Americans were ejected from the country they had tried to destroy.</p>
<p><em>Richard Gott's most recent book is “Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution" (Verso, £9.99)</em></p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 13 Aug 2009 07:24:42 +0000Richard Gott164770 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/04/engels-marx-hunt-life
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The Frock-Coated Communist: the Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels<br />
Tristram Hunt<br />
Allen Lane, 4</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><a href="/books/2009/04/engels-marx-hunt-life"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles/2009/1050/20090423_1609engels_w.jpg?itok=zWZF_Stf" width="510" height="348" alt="" /></a></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>The name of Friedrich Engels was once famous throughout the world, given to towns and streets, and to ships and railway engines. Years ago, I found his portrait displayed in a peasant’s hut on the mountain border between Vietnam and Laos. His name was umbilically attached to his more famous philosophical collaborator, as though they were a respectable 19th-century department store: Marshall &amp; Snelgrove, Fortnum &amp; Mason, Marx &amp; Engels. His life and times were evoked in numerous well-researched biographies, half a dozen in the past half-century. And then, quite suddenly, he disappeared from view. As occurred to political dissidents in the old Soviet Union, he became a non-person, someone who not only had ceased to exist, but had never existed.</p>
<p>Tristram Hunt, a writer with a talent for bringing historical subjects to the attention of a media culture that is usually history-averse, has set himself the difficult task of resurrecting this obliterated figure, and he struggles (though with little original research) to find a reason for giving us yet another biography. He seeks to recover Engels’s reputation from those who have portrayed him as responsible for Stalinist excesses, and he suggests ambitiously that a fresh examination of the works of Engels and Marx “can offer not just an insightful critique of global capitalism but new perspectives on the nature of modernity and progress, religion and ideology, colonialism and ‘liberal interventionism’, global financial crises, urban theory, feminism, even Darwinism and reproductive ethics”. These are heavy-duty claims that might look good in a newspaper article but they are not easy to substantiate and make readable in a book.</p>
<p>For, with the collapse of communism, little remains of its progenitors other than a certain antiquarian fascination. Is it useful to believe that the impending collapse of capitalism will lead us back to the utopian debates of the 19th century? Perhaps, but shorn of its intrinsic interest as the life of a man who, with his ideological partner, created a philosophy that transformed half the world, a biography of Engels is about as immediately relevant today as one of Joseph Smith, Jr and the Book of Mormon, or Mary Baker Eddy and the birth of Christian Science, or of other 19th-century figures (such as Hong Xiu­quan of the Taiping Rebellion) who invented new religions just as Engels and Marx were laying the foundation stones of “dialectical materialism” and “scientific” socialism.</p>
<p>Engels was, of course, an interesting and unusual 19th-century figure, not merely the first codifier and promoter of “Marxism”, but also a prominent participant in the progressive movement that led to the establishment of socialism in Britain – and to a concern not just with “the working class”, but with “the poor”. An émigré revolutionary from Germany, he established himself in Manchester as the accountant of his family firm, and in 1844, at the age of 24, published a pioneering study of the poor during the Industrial Revolution, <em>The Condition of the Working Class in England</em>. He warmed himself before the embers of Chartism, fought on the German barricades in 1848, and devoted the rest of his life to being the collaborator, critic and translator of his fellow émigré Karl Marx.</p>
<p>Comfortably off, though not seriously rich, Engels selflessly funded Marx and Marx’s family, enabling Marx to research and write his seminal work <em>Das Kapital</em>. A “champagne socialist” <em>avant la lettre</em> (although his favourite tipple was Pilsner), Engels was a frock-coated pillar of Mancunian society, and enjoyed a good day’s hunting – he found it “the best school of all” for revolutionary warfare.</p>
<p>Yet, throughout his life, like all good 1848ers (rather like the 1968ers), Engels believed in the continuing possibility of revolution if the economic times were right. From his vantage point in the Manchester cotton trade, he drew comfort from every downturn, bad for his firm but encouraging for the imminent upheaval. In 1856, he foresaw catastrophe: “This time there’ll be a <em>Dies Irae</em> such as has never been seen before; the whole of Europe’s industry in ruins, all markets overstocked . . . all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree.”</p>
<p>Alas, Engels was wrong, and even he ruefully acknowledged that the proletariat had been demoralised by the long preceding period of prosperity. Indeed, his predictions were often wrong. For a brief moment in 1866 he was the “military correspondent” of the <em>Manchester Guardian</em>, and just before the Prussian army crushed the Austrians at Königgrätz he informed its readers of the coming Prussian defeat.</p>
<p>He also gave voice to some singularly reactionary pronouncements, typical of the age in which he lived, although his views were not held by everyone. He rejoiced in the French conquest of Algeria and the destruction of the Bedouin. He thought it nothing more than “unfortunate” that “splendid California” had been taken away from “the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it”. He had ill-disguised contempt for indigenous peoples and was viciously anti-Slav. “I am enough of an authoritarian to regard the existence of such aborigines in the heart of Europe as an anachronism . . . They and their right of cattle-stealing will have to be mercilessly sacrificed to the interest of the European proletariat.” The next world war, he noted cheerfully, “will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”</p>
<p>Hunt does not seem to mind these aberrations, pointing out that Engels later changed his mind and became an advocate of colonial resistance. He reserves his criticism for lesser faults, erecting a caricature portrait of Engels as a prosperous mill owner and womaniser. He makes endless schoolboy references to Engels as “the legendary Lothario”, the “skirt-chaser” and “something of a sexual predator”. His youthful enthusiasm for fencing is described as a “testosterone-ridden practice”. Hunt writes of “the carnal delights” of Paris, where Engels had spent “his raffish days in boudoirs and brothels”, and even poor Marx is accused of “taking advantage” of the maid. This, though true, is not serious history but journalistic tittle-tattle. The best parts of Hunt’s book concern the evocation of London and Manchester, the subject of his earlier (and far better) book on Victorian cities, <em>Building Jerusalem</em>. Maybe he finds it easier to write about cities than about real people.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 23 Apr 2009 12:45:44 +0000Richard Gott163689 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/node/153909
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Observations on art</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Promoters and practitioners of contemporary art have congratulated themselves in recent years on securing public interest and support for their product, as well as an agreeable inflow of money from sponsors. Large corporations are tapped for support and, in capital cities at any rate, they pay up with enthusiasm.</p>
<p>Much new art is both audience-friendly and easily translatable into corporate advertising, so everyone should be happy. But what happens when the artist or the curator blurs what has become the accepted line? It happened recently in California, when the curator of a prominent museum decided to promote an exhibition in a clearly controversial way.</p>
<p>Chris Gilbert, a young curator with an impressive career trajectory, staged an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum called "Now-Time Venezuela". This featured a multi-screen video by two artists, an Italian and a German, presenting recent debates in Venezuela's worker-controlled factories. A second part sampled the work of Catia TVe, a community television station in poor areas of western Caracas.</p>
<p>The problem for Gilbert was that he wanted to present the show with the phrase "In solidarity with revolutionary Venezuela" printed on text panels. Even in Berkeley, the notion that an exhibition might promote Hugo Chávez's revolution was too much to swallow, and the museum authorities asked Gilbert to change the words.</p>
<p>Gilbert explains that the gallery wanted "neutrality" and "balance", whereas his approach was about "commitment, support and alignment". He saw himself as "taking sides with and promoting revolution". He dug his heels in and the museum authorities eventually withdrew their objections, allowing the text panels to appear as planned, but Gilbert had already decided to resign and he stood by his decision.</p>
<p>Another clash occurred in Paris last month, when the curators of a show at the Palais de Tokyo were attacked for the tainted source of their inspiration.</p>
<p><em>Le Monde</em> questioned the enthusiasm of the Palais for sponsors such as Audi and Hugo Boss, suggesting that these corporate friends were having a direct impact on what was actually shown. For example, an unexceptional exhibition of student art entitled "<em>Ultra Peau</em>", or Extreme Skin, had been sponsored by Nivea, a corporation with an obvious commercial interest in the subject.</p>
<p>What goes on behind the scenes in the art world is often a mystery to the outside world, but Gilbert had no doubt, from his experience in Berkeley, where to point the finger. He complained about "the presence of intra-institutional press and marketing departments that really operate to hold a political line through various control techniques, only one of which is censorship". And he criticised "the development departments that, in mostly hidden ways, favour and flatter rich funders, giving the lie to even the sham notion of public responsibility that the museum parades".</p>
<p>A spokesperson for the Palais de Tokyo framed the problem in terms that were both more cheerful and shameless: "This way of financing is far from a constraint. It's a good opportunity, even if it brings some collateral damage."</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 07 Aug 2006 12:00:00 +0000Richard Gott153909 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/node/153451
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Observations on Germany</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Last week's revelation about the CIA's private knowledge of the postwar whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann - about which they did nothing - recalls a campaign by the <em>New Statesman</em> in 1960 that helped bring the presence of Nazi criminals in the West German government to public attention.</p>
<p>Present-day Germany has changed so utterly that it is difficult to recall the atmosphere of the late 1950s, in which a tiny group of Germans, seeking to investigate former Nazis holding prominent positions, were obstructed by Britain and the US as well as the West German authorities. Among the most remarkable of these ex-Nazis was Hans Globke, who had been the author of the Nuremberg laws, the anti-Jewish legislation of 1935. From 1953 he was state secretary to Konrad Adenauer, the federal chancellor, which meant he was the chief liaison between the CIA, Nato and West German intelligence, and was also in charge of the federal press office. He exploited this position, not only to protect himself but to shield other former Nazis, and he even tried to secure the release of Albert Speer. </p>
<p>In March 1960, however, an editorial in the <em>New Statesman</em> by then deputy editor Paul Johnson drew attention to the fact that "men deeply involved in the Nazi terror have begun to play a leading part in the federal and provincial administrations" of West Germany. This became a campaign, backed by the likes of Barbara Castle and Jeremy Thorpe. </p>
<p>Johnson had been moved to write by an exhibition of Nazi documents that I had organised in Oxford and at the House of Commons - documents assembled by Reinhard Strecker, a West Berlin student friend who was waging a one-man campaign against Nazi criminals still in public service in his country. Many of his documents came from East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, where many of the crimes had taken place. Inevitably, he was accused of being an East German agent, but this was rubbish, for Strecker was a staunch anti-communist. He also tried to verify his material at the Nazi Party archives, which were captured by the Americans in 1945 and then housed in West Berlin, but those records were kept tightly closed. </p>
<p>This was the burden of the<em> NS</em>'s complaint. The archives had originally been controlled jointly by Britain, the US, and France, but the key had been handed over to the Americans, who had in turn effectively given it to Adenauer. </p>
<p>Barbara Castle questioned Selwyn Lloyd, the Conservative foreign secretary, but received no satisfactory explanation. George Vine, the <em>News Chronicle</em>'s man in Bonn, sought US permission to examine the records of three men with Nazi pasts, Globke and two cabinet ministers, but was told to get Foreign Office support first. This was refused.</p>
<p>By now, though, the noose was closing. In May 1960 Israel announced Eichmann's capture and his trial threw up much material that corroborated Strecker's and the <em>NS</em>'s claims. It emerged, for example, that when in 1943 Eichmann asked for 20,000 Macedonian Jews to be allowed to got to Palestine his request was turned down - by Globke. Soon several judges who had appeared on Strecker's list retired, and Globke followed in 1963, dying ten years later. Strecker is alive and well in Berlin, still working in the archives.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 19 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0000Richard Gott153451 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/node/153483
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>&lt;strong&gt;Moscow 1941: a city and its people at war&lt;/strong&gt;</p>
<p>Rodric Braithwaite &lt;em&gt;Profile Books, 4</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Not so long ago, in the years between 1941 and 1945, Britain and Stalin's Soviet Union were united in a popular alliance against Nazi Germany. The surviving traces of that special relationship in popular memory may have something to do with the fact that books about our wartime ally, many based on the newly opened Soviet archives, have been received with such enthusiasm. Rodric Braithwaite's <em>Moscow 1941</em> joins Antony Beevor's excellent <em>Stalingrad</em> and Catherine Merridale's spectacular <em>Ivan's War</em> to create an extraordinary trio of wartime stories which reveal much that was ignored or largely unknown during the cold war.</p>
<p>Indeed, many readers may find themselves more familiar with the schoolbook story of Napoleon's lightning invasion of Russia in 1812 than with Hitler's less speedy attack in 1941. Braithwaite starts his book with a map to show how the two invasions, 129 years apart, followed exactly the same route - from Warsaw to Minsk to Smolensk - and concluded with the Russians taking a stand at Borodino (now Mozhaisk), close to Moscow. For the Russians, the "Patriotic War" of 1812 merged seamlessly into the "Great Patriotic War" of 1941 to become the subject of endless myth and legend. In the postwar years, Stalin himself was reluctant to pay much attention to the Battle of Moscow; it reminded him of the moment when his entire regime was under terminal threat.</p>
<p>When Hitler launched his attack on the Soviet Union on Sunday 22 June 1941, foreign diplomats in Moscow assumed that the country would not be able to hold out for more than four or five weeks - or so Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador, had told Britain's war cabinet the previous week. Yet six months later the Russians were still holding grimly on, at a terrible price. During the battle for Moscow itself, from September 1941 to April 1942, the Russians lost nearly a million men, with endless new recruits pitched into the city's defences like so many sandbags filling a breached dyke. Braithwaite suggests that this was the greatest battle in history, involving more than seven million men from both sides. Russian casualties were larger than the combined figure for the British and Americans in the whole of the war, and when the Germans eventually fell back from Moscow it was by no means the end of the struggle. Great battles were still to take place at Stalingrad in 1942, at Kursk in 1943, and for Berlin in 1945. Leningrad was under siege for 900 days. Yet the defeat of Hitler's <em>Wehrmacht</em> outside Mos-cow made subsequent victory possible.</p>
<p>Braithwaite is an old-fashioned Russophile, a scholar-diplomat steeped in Russian history and literature who had the good fortune to be Britain's ambassador in Moscow at another significant point in world affairs, as the cold war began to lose its icy grip in the late 1980s. His new book is not quite in the same league as those of Beevor and Merridale - his command of his material is less secure and his prose is sometimes pedestrian. Yet he is able to escape from diplomacy to provide a real taste of people's history, coupling his own encyclopaedic knowledge of Moscow with material gleaned in interviews with aged survivors of those terrible years. His harsh judgement of the Soviet regime is softened by his affection for the ordinary Russians who fought back with resolution as their history and culture req uired them to do. He allows them to tell their stories of comradeship, inventiveness, hunger and horror.</p>
<p>The real crisis for Stalin's regime, and the heart of Braithwaite's book, occurred in October 1941, with the Germans at the gates of the city and a total breakdown of law and order inside. Stalin remained behind, but much of the government transferred to Kuibyshev on the Volga. People who should have known better, such as senior party officials and factory managers, made their own way out of town, often stopped and lynched by their workers. Suddenly people began praising Hitler openly and criticising Stalin. Years of pent-up resentment came to the sur-face. Eventually the authorities awoke from their slumber and reasserted order, with the customary brutality of the Soviet state. Even political prisoners held in the Lubyanka were transferred to Kuibyshev for execution.</p>
<p>One useful source that Braithwaite plunders to good effect is the memoirs of David Ortenberg, the Jewish editor of the army newspaper, <em>Krasnaya Zveda</em>, who played a crucial (and courageous) role as an intermediary between the local government of Moscow and the troops. Talented and fearless writers were recruited to accompany the soldiers and report from the front line. Previous editors had disappeared during the purges, but Ortenberg was told that his appointment had been approved by Stalin. </p>
<p>Not that this was any guarantee of safety. Whereas generals found wanting during Brit-ain's war could be swapped or exiled to India, in Stalin's Russia they were usually shot, their wives as well, although sometimes they were able to commit suicide first. The purges that had decimated the senior ranks of the Soviet officer corps in the late 1930s had eased off by 1941, but fighting what was perceived as the internal enemy as well as the external foe continued throughout the period of the German invasion, and in some cases into the postwar years. Braithwaite's book evokes a picture of a recent world that now seems far older than even the times of Ivan the Terrible.</p>
<p><em>Richard Gott is the author, with Martin Gilbert, of "The Appeasers" (Phoenix Press)</em></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 19 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0000Richard Gott153483 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/node/152425
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The Cold War</p>
<p>John Lewis Gaddis &lt;em&gt;Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 352pp, £20&lt;/em&gt;</p>
<p>ISBN 071399912</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>It was suggested over Christmas that Adolf Hitler gets too much attention in schools, and that history teaching might now move forward to the cold war. Such a notion seems eminently reasonable, and right on cue comes a book on the topic from an American historian who knows more than most. John Lewis Gaddis is a specialist who has published many large works on the cold war, and his publisher has persuaded him to write a concise guide to international history since 1945, designed for a generation not around at the time.</p>
<p>His book is a handy synthesis, yet it would be a mistake for it to be used as a textbook in British schools, because it is an unashamedly American and triumphalist version of the long US-Soviet quarrel that broke out after the Second World War. Few British historians would accept it un-critically, even with the carefully phrased puff from Peter Hennessy on the jacket.</p>
<p>No consensus exists today about the cold war, although the powerful revisionist school that existed in the US during the Vietnam war has been largely obliterated by the post-1989 euphoria. Few of those who lived through the whole of the cold war (you have to be over 60) have changed the opinions they formed at the time. Some thought the west, led by the US, was confronted by an expansionist Soviet state, held in check only by armed force and nuclear weapons. Others believed the exact opposite, arguing that an expansionist US, armed with nuclear weapons, was intent on rolling back the frontiers of the communist world.</p>
<p>A third group, to which I have long belonged, thought that the entire contest was a huge mistake, totally misconceived and possibly fabricated, both expensive and dangerous. So problematic is the topic that <em>New Statesman </em>readers, even today, can almost certainly be found in each category, sometimes holding at least two opinions at the same time.</p>
<p>The cold war took place over nearly half a century, from the Berlin Airlift, which began in April 1948, to the final extinction of the Soviet Union in December 1991. (Some might think, judging by the attitude of most western chancelleries and media outlets towards Vladimir Putin, that it continues to this day.) The Americans and the Russians fought each other, often at one remove, with every dirty weapon except the nuclear bomb. First presided over by Stalin and Harry Truman, and in effect concluded by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, the end of their icy struggle looked very different from its early beginnings.</p>
<p>Gaddis tries to provide a continuous storyline that encompasses its many twists and turns, but in practice the cold war years were unified solely by the existence of a permanent nuclear threat, a promise to commit suicide that appeared to make conventional war between great states impossible. Today we tend to ignore the fact that this terrible menace is still there, although since the collapse of the Soviet Union no powerful country has felt able to contemplate even a verbal confrontation with the United States.</p>
<p>The first period of the cold war, the 13 years from the start of the Berlin Airlift to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, was largely dominated by the German Question, a hardy perennial of European history. The much-derided wall brought a measure of stability to the European scene, and many people in the west - strange now to recall - thoroughly approved of it. I remember Richard Crossman, when editor of this paper in the early 1970s, defending it vigorously to his staff of astonished young Trotskyists.</p>
<p>Berlin, a problem left over at the end of the Second World War, gets its fair share of attention in Gaddis's book, yet in retrospect, not much emphasised here, it was the Chinese revolution in 1949 that really caused the US to panic, and gave the cold war its atmosphere of deadly menace. For several years the Yellow Peril, another ancient formulation, grew more alarming than the German Question, and provoked an often neglected war in Korea.</p>
<p>The 1950s, the classic years of cold war mythology, gave the conflict a special hold on the popular imagination. In a decade replete with spies, the activities of the parallel secret services have been well chronicled in fiction, and it is appropriate that Len Deighton provides an encomium for Gaddis's book. More relevantly, the period also witnessed the twin episodes of internal suppression in each camp - Iran and Guatemala on the western side, East Germany and Hungary on the part of the Soviets - that so discredited the cold warriors' claims to moral superiority.</p>
<p>The second period, which lasted through the 1960s and 1970s, was dominated by the mayhem and havoc of wars in the third world that arose after the collapse of Europe's colonial empires. This particular cold war development, arguably of more historical consequence than the stale east-west conflict in Europe, gets little space in Gaddis's book, perhaps because it led to the crushing US defeat in Vietnam. As a result of that US disaster, which did not affect the peace and prosperity of western Europe, the Americans began to talk of detente and disarmament, of strategic arms limitations and human rights. Urged on by European social democrats, the global conflict settled into a cosy and manageable routine that continued to keep wars far from the European heartland.</p>
<p>Finally, in the 1980s, this apparent stability was shown to have been built on shaky foundations. When the US took up the Soviet challenge in Afghanistan, when the Hungarians and the Poles began to chart their separate paths towards a fresh settlement with Moscow, and when a new generation of nuclear weapons was deployed in Europe, the old verities began to collapse.</p>
<p>Gaddis makes much of the role of Pope John Paul II, a deus ex machina who threw his weight behind the emerging opposition forces in central Europe, but the real cause of Gorbachev's internal reforms that detonated the final crisis was the lamentable state of the Soviet economy, a subject to which Gaddis gives scant attention.</p>
<p>The Americans emerge from Gaddis's account smelling of roses, yet, in the wake of the US seizure of Iraq and the unfolding of a fresh imperial agenda, future historians may look less benignly on America's role in the cold war. They might well conclude that the Russians were right to be alarmed by American power, given that while Soviet forces had advanced a few hundred miles into central Europe in 1945, and stayed there until 1989, the Americans had leap- frogged over oceans to put their troops into western Europe and Japan - and have kept them there to this day.</p>
<p>French philosophers might argue that the cold war did not actually take place, yet under its imagined threat the US was able to extend its ideological and cultural control over western Europe, effectively undermining and eventually destroying the old leftist and working-class movements built up since the 19th century - the cold war's most lasting and pernicious legacy. Gaddis's book plays the old tunes well, but some readers may still find it less riveting than the story of the unfolding of the Third Reich. If history teachers want to hold the attention of their students, they will probably be justified in continuing with Hitler for a while longer.</p>
<p><em>Richard Gott is writing a book about imperial rebellions</em></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 23 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000Richard Gott152425 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/node/150829
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>From the Sixties going back to the suffragettes and the Levellers, Britain has a long history of reb</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Several entangled traditions of political protest will be celebrated in Scotland in the first week of July, when representatives of the world's "Great Powers", the so-called G8, attend their annual gathering - to ensure that the world continues to be run for their benefit. As is usual on such occasions, many groups of demonstrators will be present, some bearing peaceful witness, others seeking to push out the boundaries of permitted protest.</p>
<p>On the revolutionary left are the anarchistic activists who have made these meetings a priority ever since their notable explosion on to the international scene at Seattle in 1999 and at Genoa in 2001. They will assemble at Gleneagles on Wednesday 6 July (the first day of the G8 conference) under the banner "Another World is Possible" - the anti-capitalist slogan of the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre; the McDonald's-trashing followers of Jose Bove, the French agrarian activist; and the luminaries of the Socialist Workers Party. Judging by past experience, there could be more than a clash of ideas. These are the new generation of protesters, who attract the most police attention. They do not necessarily court violence, but they belong to a tradition of direct action, of taking a protest beyond the limits of the law.</p>
<p>On the reformist right are those who march or demonstrate against injustice within the law. Theirs is an ancient, semi-religious dissenting tradition, channelled these days through churches and non-governmental organisations such as Oxfam, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. They lobby for debt relief and increased aid for development, often work with governments, and generally receive a favourable reception from politicians and in the media. They will demonstrate in Edinburgh a few days earlier, on Saturday 2 July, under the optimistic and non-controversial slogan "Make poverty history".</p>
<p>So which of these protests does history suggest will be the most effective? I have taken part in similar demonstrations for as long as I can remember, and I recognise both the muddle and the underlying patterns of protest. They have bubbled away beneath the surface at least since the 19th century. I have been on demos, legal and illegal, and I would argue that both have a role to play. In the 1960s, I used to go on CND's Aldermaston marches, which were largely peaceful, but I also supported the actions of the more radical Committee of 100, who, especially against US nuclear airbases, set out to break the law. The atmosphere at the demos against the American war in Vietnam was far more militant than the aura of Quaker peace that prevailed on the road from Aldermaston, and I experienced a frisson last March when the anti-war demo in London was allowed to take a detour around Grosvenor Square, probably for the first time since the riots of the 1960s.</p>
<p>Extra-parliamentary political action has long been one of the channels through which ideas and issues are brought strikingly to the attention of the public (think of the Chartists, the Fenians beloved of Marx, the suffragettes, and the Levellers and Diggers of the 17th century), and the debate about the political impact of illegal action and peaceful resistance has always been the same. Can Gandhi's methods work, or does a more vigorous challenge to the state help speed up the process? And does a combination of the two negate the impact of the more peaceful protests?</p>
<p>We were internationalists in the 1960s, but influenced more by comparable movements in the United States, notably those promoting civil rights, than by those in Europe. Today's activists tend to be in contact with anti-capitalist groups in Europe. Everyone is conscious, too, of the various exhibitions of "people power" that have emerged since the collapse of communism, giving additional legitimacy to the strategy of mass street protest.</p>
<p>The Sixties demonstrations became a way of life for millions of people. The unexpected student fireworks of 1968 led eventually to the creation of an international culture that had influence far beyond the narrow concerns of parliamentary politics, and spread eventually to the farthest corners of the world. In May alone, one and a half million Christian evangelicals assembled in the streets of Sao Paulo in Brazil. Such scenes, previously unimaginable in a predominantly Catholic country, have much to do with the global cultural break-up of the 1960s.</p>
<p>Forty years ago, protest and the culture of taking politics to the streets was more contested than it is today, though police repression can be just as fierce. Protest was tolerated in the 1960s, just about, but the British generally were unprepared for the cultural tsunami of alternative politics, rock music and mind-bending drugs that unrolled during the course of the decade. Protests, demonstrations, sit-downs, teach-ins, folk music, rock concerts, motor scooters and cannabis were all lumped together with long hair and duffel coats in the minds of Britain's conservative establishment. The culture of protest met with widespread disapproval and sometimes with outright hostility.</p>
<p>Today it is taken for granted. It is the background to everyone's life, the fodder regularly served up by the media. Middle-class parents expect their teenage children to go to Reading and Glastonbury, and would be disappointed if they didn't. Many will happily wave them off to Scotland in July to do their bit to make poverty history. Everyone now acknowledges the citizen's historic right to take part in political protest. And yet there is little support for anarchist disregard for the law.</p>
<p>The unusually large anti-war demo of February 2003 in London, where more than a million people marched to protest against the impending invasion of Iraq, is taken as a benchmark of what can and should be done. But just how effective was it? It brought out an extraordinary cross-section of Middle England, many of whom were not from the conventional demonstrating classes. Indeed, the great banners of the trade-union movement were hard to spot among them. It revealed the extent of the disquiet about the Iraq war in the establishment and in the media. It certainly produced a change of heart among a significant number of Labour MPs, and may well have contributed to the party's loss of seats at this year's election. Yet it did not deliver the goods. The MPs voted for war, and the invasion of Iraq went ahead.</p>
<p>The permanent peace demonstration of Brian Haw, who has been camping out with his banners in Parliament Square for the past four years, may have had just as much, or as little, impact. Years ago I tested the limits of legality in a similar way. I was arrested in Trafalgar Square for making a speech about nuclear weapons without the permission of the home secretary. The arrest was made under the terms of some 14th-century legislation, then still on the statute book, which forbade public debate or assembly within a mile of Westminster while parliament was sitting. For this small protest, I was fined £10. I refused to pay, but my father paid it when the bailiffs came to the door. I was in good company, given that earlier I had joined the illegal sit-down with Bertrand Russell and the Committee of 100 outside the Ministry of Defence, on the pavement looking over St James's Park.</p>
<p>Brian Haw's long-drawn-out protest would not have been possible in those days, and doubtless it will be forbidden again soon. Haw defeated an injunction taken out against him by Westminster City Council, and memorably declared that "peace is more popular than parliament". It will be more difficult to get round David Blunkett's legacy, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, known as Soca, legislation for which was finally passed in April. Soca was originally designed to deal with "serious" and "organised" crime, but the Home Office lawyers took the opportunity to tidy up and reinstate some ancient public order legislation at the same time. The environs of Parliament Square in which permission to demonstrate has to be sought have now been reduced to a one-kilometre radius, but in other respects the situation is much as it was in the 14th century - that is, strictly controlled.</p>
<p>Protest has registered peaks and troughs over the past half-century, as causes come and go. The campaigns against nuclear weapons and war, the alarm aroused over the deteriorating environment and the perennial problem of the Fenians have never quite disappeared, but other issues have sprung up at intervals, sometimes with surprising force. The demonstration against the poll tax in March 1990 turned into the worst riot in the capital since the 19th century. It produced the usual condemnations, notably from the then shadow home secretary, Roy Hattersley, who called for "exemplary sentences" for those "convicted of committing criminal acts" - the authentic voice of libertarian Labour.</p>
<p>Yet just how effective were the riots? They certainly drew attention to discontent about the poll tax, and perhaps they speeded its demise. Some argue that they hastened the departure of Margaret Thatcher at the end of that year, yet her exit may more justly be laid at the doors of the Tory ministers who had decided for other reasons that her time was up. The riots left no wider political legacy. Who now remembers the group that called itself Class War?</p>
<p>Ten years later, the May Day protest in Parliament Square in 2000 hinted at the start of a new phenomenon. Anti-capitalist demonstrators mobilised privately and on the internet, and organised a delightful programme of "guerrilla gardening" in the square. They moved on to destroy the nearest McDonald's, and the event was given notoriety by the man who gave the statue of Winston Churchill a green Mohican hairdo. To some, it seemed an amusing, rather British occasion, but to new Labour it evoked memories of Seattle in 1999, and the need to combat this new form of activism. When the demonstrators assembled at Oxford Circus on May Day the following year, the police were ready. The entire area was turned into an exclusion zone, and thousands of people were detained there for many hours. May Day protests on that scale and likely to attract the same degree of repression have now been abandoned, although the heirs and successors of the protesters will certainly turn up at Gleneagles in July. Reclaim the Streets, the original May Day protest group, has disappeared into history, along with Class War.</p>
<p>Not all the demonstrators of recent years have come from the left. The <em>Daily Telegraph</em> used to bracket "pinkoes" with "pacifists" in a single phrase, yet pacifists, as anyone who has had dealings with them well knows, can be both conservative and Conservative. Iain Duncan Smith gave the Tory party's imprimatur to street protest in September 2002 when he joined the marchers of the Countryside Alliance, while many people argue that the violent attacks on individual scientists unleashed by animal rights activists come from the right rather than the left. Here again, violent protest has proved counter-productive, because important clauses in the Soca legislation were directed against the activists (as well as to protect the bankers, investors and shareholders who do business with animal research facilities).</p>
<p>The post-election political atmosphere does not suggest that the protests in Scotland will produce a seismic shock of the kind caused by the poll-tax riots or those at Seattle. There will be people with wire-cutters who will seek to penetrate Gleneagles, with its grassy lawns, to protest against the war criminals gathered within, but most people who obey Bob Geldof's call to arms on behalf of poverty and climate change will enjoy a peaceful break. Demonstrators of every stripe take part in public protest because they believe it to be the right thing to do, not because they expect any immediate result. When the smoke clears from the battle of Gleneagles, the leaders of the G8 mafia will continue their work unaffected. Their helicopters will whisk them away, and their spokesmen will stay behind to issue bland communiques drafted long before. The world will not be turned upside down.</p>
<p>Yet the protesters themselves will be changed. However the demonstrations end up, with a peaceful sit-down in the sunshine or violent clashes in the heather, old stagers and youthful neophytes will continue to find a sense of purpose in their actions. Utopias are not much in fashion any more, but that does not stop people looking for them. The meeting of like-minded people to discuss, argue - and demonstrate - together is one of the ways in which our exhausted political culture is endlessly refreshed.</p>
<p><strong>Crossing that line: some views</strong></p>
<p><strong>Shami Chakrabarti</strong> (Liberty) Departure from the law is a serious step and the first aim must be to protest within the legitimate democratic process. However, as individual moral beings, we cannot blindly follow laws, particularly when the laws themselves are used to close off legal, democratic avenues of protest.</p>
<p><strong>Tony Benn</strong> If you engage in civil disobedience, you must be willing to pay the penalty, but history will be the real judge. Non-violent demonstration can be extremely powerful. Gandhi was continually imprisoned and had an enormous influence. Violent disobedience is different: it does not aim at education, but is an attempt to seize power.</p>
<p><strong>Roger Scruton</strong> The G8 summit is one of those depressing meetings of people with more power than they deserve for the purpose of deciding more things than they understand. How to stop such things happening? I don't know.</p>
<p><strong>Suzanne Moore</strong> The most important issue is that people feel, in that visceral sense, their own power. Learning the value of collective defiance is worth years of schooling, which is why I agree with Bob Geldof that schoolkids should truant for a day.</p>
<p><strong>Nick Cohen</strong> Moral protesters never resort to violence and they always accept responsibility for their actions. Martin Luther King believed in civil disobedience; people who torch McDonald's just get a kick out of destruction.</p>
<p><strong>Ted Honderich</strong> Mass civil disobedience to the fullest extent conceivable is the best thing that could happen - everything that can be thought of, and much that hasn't been thought of, that is a rational means to the end. That end is getting people out of bad lives.</p>
<p><strong>John Hilary</strong> (War on Want) The fight to make poverty history will gain immensely from a peaceful demo that is noisy, colourful and massive. Bring it on!</p>
<p><strong>Jon Snow</strong> I don't believe there will be any civil disobedience - I imagine it will be more of a fiesta. I will be in Africa at the time, seeing what things look like from their perspective.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 13 Jun 2005 12:00:00 +0000Richard Gott150829 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/node/150714
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Petain</p>
<p>Charles Williams &lt;em&gt;Little, Brown, 568pp, £30&lt;/em&gt;</p>
<p>ISBN 0316861278</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>A splendid cartoon by Philip Zec, published in the <em>Daily Mirror</em> on 11 October 1940, showed Marshal Petain waving his sabre on the palm-fringed beach at Dakar, gallantly defending the Senegalese slice of the Vichy-controlled French empire against a British and Free French attack. The Allied attempt to seize Dakar Harbour in September had been a dismal failure, one of the many disasters of 1940, and the <em>Mirror</em> was in Winston Churchill's bad books after publishing what was regarded as a defeatist article by H G Wells. To regain the government's confidence in the paper, and to deride and belittle the Vichy leader (then aged 84), Zec showed him in a wheelchair being pushed along the shore by a Nazi soldier in jackboots.</p>
<p>The image does not appear in Charles Williams's biography of this now somewhat forgotten figure (in Britain at least) who presided over the French armistice with Hitler in 1940 and the subsequent dismemberment of France. Williams tries to make a positive case for Petain, a soldier who is usually perceived at best as defeatist, at worst as a traitor. Here he is depicted as a patriotic general, a hero of the First World War who did what was required of him in difficult circumstances at the start of the Second. Yet in spite of the whitewash, he emerges as a sad and vain figure, a conservative nationalist caught up in an unfamiliar political world that he disliked intensely.</p>
<p>It is, in fact, difficult to summon up enthusiasm for the life and career of Henri Philippe Petain. A mediocre officer who found himself on top of the heap at the end of the First World War, largely as the result of Buggins's turn, he shared all the postwar prejudices of that large section of the French middle class that was anti-Semitic, anti-communist and sympathetic to fascism. Although he never joined Action Francaise or any of the groupuscules of the French right, Petain packed off French Jews to German concentration camps without a qualm. His hero was Miguel Primo de Rivera, the absurd Spanish fascist of the 1920s. Before he was called to play his part as the saviour of the nation, his job was as France's ambassador to Franco's victorious new nation, seeking to bind up wounds at the end of the civil war.</p>
<p>Somewhere in the catalogue of conflictive episodes that has defined the Anglo-French relationship over the centuries, the disastrous defeatism of Marshal Petain must surely have a prominent place. As defeat loomed on the Belgian border in the desperate days of June 1940, the French ruling elite gave up with barely a strug- gle, claiming that the British, too, would be bound to succumb. They ignored the impassioned words of Churchill, who urged them to continue the resistance from the Brittany peninsula. Whatever happened, Churchill told them, Britain "would fight on and on and on, <em>toujours</em>, all the time; everywhere, <em>partout</em>; <em>pas de grace</em>, no mercy. <em>Puis la victoire</em>." Petain thought he was joking; for he had no stomach for such a fight. Indeed, Chur-chill noted that Petain "had always been a defeatist, even in the last war".</p>
<p>Williams attempts to address this cal-umny, portraying the "Victor of Verdun" as a general who preferred defence to attack, and who always paid attention to the care of his troops. The great battle of 1916 was chalked up as a French victory, and made Petain's reputation. It brought him the lasting loyalty of thousands of ex-combatants. Yet it remains one of the great bloodbaths of the Great War, lasting for most of that year and causing nearly a million casualties.</p>
<p>Petain lived for a very long time, and he comes across as a man who was always old. Born in 1856, he was already old at the time of the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s, in which he first played what would become his customary pusillanimous role. He was old in 1914, and contemplating retirement, when summoned to assemble his brigade at Arras, experiencing shots fired in action for the first time in his life. And he was really old - some would say senile - in the summer of 1940 when he became prime minister and president. He died in prison in July 1951 at the age of 95, after General de Gaulle had commuted his conviction for treachery in 1945.</p>
<p>Williams assumes that British readers will be fascinated that, although always old, Petain had an active sex life with many partners and a long-suffering wife whom he treated abominably. Yet with few genuine details available, Williams can provide only a dreary and unnecessary recital of gossip and innuendo. Whatever claims Williams may have as an exemplary biographer, his skills are not much in evidence in this book. His style is often arch and irritating, with an excess of worldly-wise comment. Characters are introduced with little ceremony, and are often not to be found in the index. Entirely lacking is any sense of the French social and political context that Petain personified, and there is no reference to the extraordinary life beyond the grave of the man who surrendered his country to Hitler. The Germans are generally perceived to have come to terms with their past; the French still have great difficulty living with the legacy of Petain.</p>
<p><em>Richard Gott is the author (with Martin Gilbert) of </em>The Appeasers<em>, published by the Phoenix Press</em></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 23 May 2005 12:00:00 +0000Richard Gott150714 at http://www.newstatesman.com